Facing fourth-and-9 with its undefeated regular season at stake heading into the final quarter against Wisconsin at Camp Randall Stadium, the Oregon football team had known all week what it was going to do.
Ahead of the biggest fourth-down call of the season to that point, trailing the unranked Badgers on Nov. 16 in Madison, the Ducks started to dance and jump.
“Jump Around” has played during the second half of Wisconsin games for decades. With the whole stadium of Badgers red rocking to House of Pain, Oregon joined in just before the most significant moment of the season to that point.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel converted by slicing a pass through the Badgers’ secondary to Terrance Ferguson, and after more late-game heroics, the Ducks slipped past Wisconsin to preserve its undefeated regular season, 16-13.
The Ducks, and third-year head coach Dan Lanning, had prepared for that exact moment, one that was months in the making.
While Oregon didn’t reach the ever-elusive College Football Playoff national championship, falling to Ohio State in the quarterfinals in the Rose Bowl, players, coaches and fans agree Lanning is the leader who can help bring the Ducks to the biggest stage.
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Dan Lanning leans on experience, mentors to motivate and lead Ducks: ‘Anything and everything’
From the time Lanning played college football at William Jewell College in Missouri from 2004-07, he knew he wanted to work in the sport and eventually become an NCAA Division I head coach.
The Kansas City native drove 13 hours to Pittsburgh to get one of his first jobs coaching college football under Pitt head coach Todd Graham in 2011 after coaching at Park Hill South High School for three years. He followed Graham to Arizona State as a graduate assistant and eventually a recruiting coordinator from 2012-13 before making another jump to Sam Houston State as a defensive backs coach in 2014.
Lanning made several stops along the way, including under Nick Saban as a graduate assistant at Alabama and at Memphis until he finally made his way to Georgia to be Kirby Smart’s outside linebackers coach in 2018. In less than a year, Lanning was promoted to defensive coordinator, where he guided one of the best defenses assembled in modern college football before Oregon hired him in December 2021.
Those experiences — including national championships with Georgia in 2022 and Alabama in 2015 — and fighting to eventually earn a head coaching gig have guided Lanning through his first three seasons in Eugene, culminating in a historically dominant season in Oregon’s first year in the Big Ten Conference.
Part of the Ducks’ success this season came from those experiences, and particularly how he motivates his players through a long season.
“Anything and everything,” Lanning said of where he finds ideas to motivate his players. “We’ll pull from anywhere, anything we see to try and use that as motivation.”
Dan Lanning’s peers call him perfect blend of motivator, teacher and coach for Oregon football
Every Monday during the season, Lanning begins the week with a theme.
The Ducks’ program pillars are connection, toughness, growth and sacrifice, and each year Lanning also comes up with preseason themes that are unique to each team.
Then, each week Lanning has found unique ways to motivate his team and keep the players fresh.
Players have come to look forward to those Monday meetings to see what the 38-year-old coach comes up with.
“I’m surprised with how creative he is because we have a lot of weeks in football and every theme of the week is spot on,” inside linebacker Bryce Boettcher said. “I don’t know, he must do a lot of thinking before the season to get these ideas, but I love it. I love that we have a theme every week.”
Lanning will occasionally pitch theme ideas to his assistants and leaders on the team. But players and coaches alike said it’s mostly, if not all, Lanning who comes up with every theme.
“Dan is the best motivator I’ve ever been around,” offensive coordinator Will Stein said. “It’s all him. He might hit us with a theme or two. But that’s what they pay him the big bucks to do, is to get our team motivated and he’s as good as anyone I’ve ever been around. His messaging is very clear and precise.”
Dan Lanning makes the mundane interesting for Oregon football
For Lanning, that all comes from making the mundane interesting.
Throughout a long season that began with fall camp in August and finished on New Year’s Day in the Rose Bowl, players and coaches said football never felt mundane under Lanning’s guidance.
Before a 38-17 early November win against defending national champion Michigan on the road, Lanning referenced the movie “Gladiator,” and had his team watch as fans left the stands early in the middle of a blowout win.
Before earning his first win over rival Washington to close the regular season, Lanning gave Boettcher — a two-sport star and also a baseball player for Oregon — a baseball bat, likening the senior to a scene from the film, “Inglourious Basterds.” He later had an assistant coach bash in a Husky helmet in the locker room during Oregon’s 49-21 trouncing of UW.
“They pay off because we believe in it,” receivers coach Junior Adams said. “We see it happen before it happens. In a way it’s like manifesting a bit. He puts the plan in place, there isn’t one person in the organization that doesn’t believe in the plan, in the process to execute the plan, and that’s what happens.”
Players, coaches and peers believe in Dan Lanning and Oregon’s future: ‘Dan’s a beast’
The Ducks ultimately didn’t accomplish their goal of winning a national championship this season, falling 41-21 to Ohio State in the College Football Playoff quarterfinals in Pasadena. But there was not a doubt in the locker room after the game or in the days following that Lanning would be the coach to one day get it done for a program desperately seeking a national title.
Stein called Lanning the perfect leader for Oregon’s program and the best coach he’s ever worked with.
Offensive line coach A’lique Terry harkened back to that Wisconsin game, when Oregon made a frantic comeback, as the perfect example of a coach that does his research and sees that preparation come to fruit on gameday.
“There needs to be a calm confidence, and he’s helped build that because he says that on Monday,” Terry said. “No ifs, ands or buts about it. No matter what the score was, when we heard that song, being able to put that in our guys minds, when that situation happened on fourth-and-9, nobody flinched or blinked because we said for four days in a row what we were going to do.”
The Ducks danced, jumped and smiled despite trailing and facing a pivotal fourth-down play that could have drastically altered the course of their entire season.
One play later they converted that fourth down, and by game’s end, Lanning and his players were celebrating another win.
That moment was emblematic of the whole schedule full of themes and moments that led to Oregon’s Big Ten championship win in its first full season in the conference, and a 13-0 start before a premature end in the playoffs.
One thing Oregon fans, coaches and players are sure of is Lanning will get the Ducks back in this position in the years to come and eventually lead the Ducks to a national title.
Lanning has stated numerous times that the “grass is damn green in Eugene” and that he’s content with his current situation at Oregon, even rebuffing rumored interest when the Alabama and Texas A&M jobs opened up during the 2023 season.
The third-year coach is locked up with the Ducks through 2031 and is being paid $8.4 million per season in salary plus $1 million in deferred compensation.
“He shows up to work, but on the flip side he’s also compassionate about his players and loves his guys,” Stein said. “He’s the perfect blend of the motivator, disciplined head coach, but also players love playing for him because these guys want discipline in their lives and they want to be coached. … It’s all him and he’s phenomenal at it.”
Alec Dietz covers University of Oregon football, volleyball, women’s basketball and baseball for The Register-Guard. You may reach him at adietz@registerguard.com and you can follow him on X @AlecDietz.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Oregon’s Dan Lanning is perfect leader, players and coaches say
